The Congressman From Reddit

Congressman Jim McGovern is going where few of his colleagues on Capitol Hill have gone before: the front page of Reddit.

The Democratic Massachusetts Congressman’s office has been quietly posting to the site, and on Tuesday achieved Internet nirvana when a link posted by the Congressman’s account soared to the top of the site, garnering more than 3000 up votes and 500 comments.

The link was posted with the headline: “I’m Congressman Jim McGovern, and I just introduced two constitutional amendments to overturn Citizens United, get the money out of politics, and restore ‘We, the people.’”

The Reddit link leads to a video posted on the Congressman’s YouTube account of McGovern introducing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling.

“We need to empower people, not corporations or big money special interests. Our current system has been corrupted. It undermines the rights of ordinary citizens. It undermines our democracy,” McGovern says in the video. “Surely this is not the system our founders envisioned. The preamble to the constitution is ‘We the People.’ Let us hope that this Congress doesn’t forget that.”

Other links from the Congressman, such as a link to speech another speech about overturning Citizens United from early January garnered 235 up votes.

A McGovern spokesman says that they’ve been on Reddit for about a year, and that an AMA is “the next step.”

For now, McGovern’s office says they will keep posting “certain things that will be interesting to the community,” noting they don’t post every speech or op-ed because they don’t want to abuse their Reddit success.